Evaluating the effects of cascading failures in a network of critical infrastructures Online publication date: Fri, 28-Aug-2015
by William Hurst; Áine MacDermott
International Journal of System of Systems Engineering (IJSSE), Vol. 6, No. 3, 2015
Abstract: Networks of interconnected critical infrastructures are the supporting mechanisms of every industrialised nation. Mutually reliant on each other, their service provisions cross borders. This reliance is also a great weakness. The level of dependence each infrastructure has on another means that a failure has the potential to cascade, resulting in devastating impact on the economy, e-government, defence and society as a whole. Predicting the effects of a cascading failure is a challenge. In this paper, an approach for identifying the effects of a cascading failure is portrayed. A simulation depicting a virtual city is presented, in order to assess the spread of faults originating from a telecommunications infrastructure. Subtle behaviour changes have the potential to spread, with both significant and minor impacts. These variations can be mitigated for using data classification techniques to assess behaviour changes, with an overall accuracy of 85.61% using the TreeC classifier.
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of System of Systems Engineering (IJSSE):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com
Our Blog 
Follow us on Twitter 
Visit us on Facebook